arXiv subjects

Joerg Matthes

Publications and source records attributed to Joerg Matthes.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Thinking Less to Simulate Better: Intuitive Prompting Improves LLM Agents Simulating Individual Social Media Reactions, Including Unfamiliar Content

Platform policies are increasingly tested on artificial users, making agent fidelity important. Yet convincing fake profiles could also manipulate perceived public opinion before elections. Validation has concentrated on agreement with human behaviour and has paid little attention to whether an agent behaves in line with the profile it was given. The present study profiled eight Serbian participants through a questionnaire, a deep interview, and a written self-presentation, recorded their reactions to sixty-eight social media posts, and asked four language models to predict those reactions under five prompt conditions varying profile content and instruction style. Attitudinal content improved prediction over demographic backstories by a wide margin. Agents matched their stated profiles more closely than participants matched their own survey answers, and consistency proved unrelated to fidelity once profile information was present. Instructing models to respond intuitively and immediately rather than analytically gave the highest fidelity of any condition and cut the compression of individual differences from seven times the human level to three. The advantage held on posts about topics the questionnaire never raised, where that condition reached the highest fidelity of any setup and beat a crowd baseline by a wide margin, which suggests that agents prompted this way could serve as general-purpose simulated users rather than specialists on the topics they were profiled for. Results may bear implications for the development of language models, because intuition-based setups appear better suited to some tasks than reasoning-based ones.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Knowing You Is Everything: LLM Agents Achieve Near-Perfect Profile-Consistent Reaction Prediction in Social Media Simulation

Autonomous AI agents in social media present concrete risks to democratic discourse and platform governance, while also offering tools for pre-deployment recommender system testing. A central open question is whether persona-prompted LLMs can simulate individual-level social media reactions with sufficient accuracy to support either application, and how accuracy depends on profile completeness, model selection, and the generalization challenge posed by novel post content. This study benchmarks twelve LLM configurations on binary like/dislike prediction across 296 survey-based agent profiles and 26 ground-truth-mapped posts under three profile conditions, with leave-post-out machine learning classifiers as baselines. Across full-profile conditions, accuracy ranges from 75.54% to 96.68%, with a 30-point spread attributable primarily to model selection and confirmed by paired McNemar tests with agent-level bootstrap intervals. GPT-5.5 Pro accuracy degrades monotonically from 96.68% under a full profile to 62.32% under a reduced profile and to 51.00% with demographics alone, the last indistinguishable from the majority-class baseline, which confirms that demographic inference provides negligible predictive signal. Supervised classifiers collapse to 15.4% under leave-post-out, while LLMs sustain genuine zero-shot generalization unavailable to trained methods. Adaptive reasoning improves accuracy substantially for some models. Inter-model agreement is nearly double for posts with direct profile anchors (mean \k{appa} = 0.44) than for posts without them (\k{appa} = 0.23), and the least heterogeneous configuration homogenizes 34% of simulated population reactions. Results validate LLM-based simulation for recommender system stress-testing while documenting the behavioral accuracy that makes large-scale synthetic agent swarms a credible threat to public opinion.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

The Dual Impact of Virtual Reality: Examining the Addictive Potential and Therapeutic Applications of Immersive Media in the Metaverse

The emergence of the metaverse - envisioned as a hyperreal virtual universe enabling boundless human interaction - has the potential to revolutionize our conception of media. This transformation could alter society as we know it. This paper identifies addictive features of social media, including immersion, interactivity, real-time access, and personalization. These features are examined within the context of virtual reality through a literature review and content analysis, aimed at exploring the potential consequences of metaverse development. From an initial pool of 193,218 documents, a refined selection of N = 44 relevant papers formed the basis of our qualitative analysis. About half of the analyzed papers indicate that these features contribute to VR addiction. Interestingly, the same features that contribute to addictive behaviors can also be harnessed for positive therapeutic interventions of VR, particularly in treating addictions and managing mental health conditions. This duality, observed in the other half of the papers, emphasizes the complex role of VR technologies, suggesting that they can serve as a substitute for other addictions. This phenomenon is placed into the historical context of evolving media technologies that increasingly mimic reality. The complex interplay of factors contributing to addiction necessitates the development of algorithmic solutions that actively curate diverse offerings, rather than promoting a closed loop of like-minded views. Traditional models of addiction should be adapted to address these unique challenges. Finally, the discussion turned to the implications of these findings for a society where the metaverse is widely accepted as a mainstream technology.

cs.CY↗